The Long Weekend

With the arrival of summer, the luckiest ones among us (those who have work) may also have the privilege (if they have the resources) of taking an occasional break from the routine – a long weekend to kick back and relax.

This was certainly more than we expected.

I’m not saying that I get to do that, but if I did, I’d resist taking pictures. Taking pictures is work. A Long Weekend is supposed to be the opposite of work. Plus, receiving pictures of someone else’s vacation can be a very mixed blessing. While it’s nice to see that your friends get to travel and have fun, when you’re stuck in place it can be thoroughly annoying to see that your friends get to travel and have fun. No one wants to be so selfish and resentful in response to someone else’s joy. It just happens.

The room had a memorable view!

It’s even worse if they give you a detailed description of the fun they’re having without you. I sometimes imagine there are darker truths behind the “having a wonderful time” e-mail – horrible things vacationers try to obscure with their overly cheerful accounts of sights seen and towns toured. You know – petty arguments over where to eat and tales of disappointment about the lodgings. An update on THAT part of the trip would be much more compelling. Perhaps.

Flora and Fauna

But I would never burden you with that. Like I say, I might not even be having a long weekend right now. Thursday morning is pretty early to start – that’s almost BEYOND a long weekend – nearing AWOL status. It’s the sort of embarrassing behavior a shy and humiliated person apologizes for at length in a roundabout way without even admitting it. And since I wouldn’t take pictures anyway, you’ll just have to use your imagination with these photos, which were definitely NOT taken this weekend.

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118 thoughts on “The Long Weekend”

we used to go to leech to visit my folks. i dont have a cabin and do not want one to look after. i have difficulty looking after my lawn now. i dont have the luxury at this time in my life to have weekends. i have fastpitch softball events. every weekend. it is just in the nick of time. i have ended my sons sports activities and now have the two daughters to focus on. base ball ends in july/august and we have a wedding to do this year. and then a 2 week vacation if it works out. yellowstone is the goal. we used to go every year and the oder kids are pros. the young ones have heard the stories but have no memory. we will try to fix that. i love camping, i love cities like chicago and new york. i get to travel for work but it is never enough and i could travel forever and never stop if the events on which i based my decisions ever called for that so i guess i could be happy about anywhere for a long weekend. on a beach with a beer, in the woods with a pair of binoculars, in a town at the flea market, in a city with a bus token, im pretty easy

i tuned yesterday morning and then again in the evening (one of those days) and was surprised to see the 130 replys to do you take breaks. well the fiasco in duluth was in my brain form hearing about it on the news and i was aware clyde was shanghaied in escanaba but wow. we have a pretty storng duluth superior tie here on the trial. i hope everyones family and friends are ok. the fury of unleashed randomness is a toughie and the north shore got it in spades. cant michele bachman take some credit for job creation in rebuilding the city after the storm i beieve it will be her best work yet. bless michelle bachman for all her hard work. glad steve and krista were able to get up there in spite of all the crap. and dont forget to vote for ice creamhttp://www.kempsnextflavor.com/

I voted again, but I’m not sure that either of my votes registered. When I press on the VOTE button, a couple of arrows spin around and around endlessly. Anyone else experience this? Also I checked the comments. Might be worth while leaving some positive comments. Someone left a negative one on B-A’s and one other flavor.

Motel rooms serve as our cabin or camp ground these days. When we lived in Indiana we went to a cabin owned by a relative of wife and we liked going there, but have never managed to have our own cabin. I wouldn’t mind having a small, somewhat primitive cabin that would probably be similar to Steve’s. Also, I wouldn’t mind doing some camping, like we did in the past, but it seems we are currently locked into doing our camping in motel rooms.

i have a friend who has a fistfull of 1960’s aluminum trailers he thought were cool and then never got to on his refurbishing mission. they are very cool and only about 3-5 thousand if anyone is interested. a cool way to camp for the non tenting crowd.

For a period of about seven years, we had an old Airstream trailer sitting in our back yard. It was husband’s intention to refurbish it. Never happened. Sold it about eight years ago to someone else with the same intentions. He sold it last year to someone who is actually doing it.

Jacque, by any chance was your art in Jordan done with the supervision of Christian Schmidt? He made my wedding ring. He was a bright guy who wrote a book about the principles of aesthetics. Lived in Jordan.

hang in there clyde. i hope all the destruction leads to a realization of what a true treasure we tend to take for granted. i am still frustrated with the bush claims that there is no global warming funded by exxon but i am afraid we get to live with the consequences of bad stewardship this time around, the storms and 400% weather patterns will soon be the norm i am afraid. how do you prepare for something like that. the north shore will still be wonderful but the roads and trails will need a little tweaking in the months of june and july this season.

I said goodbye yesterday, but I’m here until before closing doors on my little pink castle and heading out for Cornucopia by the “back door.” I-35 and our usual Wisconsin Highways to the cabin are damaged and/or closed. No problem. I lived two summers in Brule, Wisconsin, and I long ago learned the intricate network of obscure blacktop Wisconsin county roads that don’t make many maps. You can get there from here; you just have to slide east and travel tiny, winding roads that we used to roar around on with motorcycles. Several lifetimes ago.

The issue of concern was whether we could get to the cabin. Access is via a gravel road that was cut in two places by torrential runoff. A friend in Cornucopia checked that out yesterday and said that local crews are working hard to repair the road, for some folks live along that road all year.

Late in the 19th century some guys set up a quarrying operation to harvest blocks of reddish sandstone (what we know as “brownstone”) along the cliff overlooking Superior. My cabin sits behind one of those old quarries. It is a queer cabin, sixteen-sided and flat on top. It’s builder called the cabin he erected “a bad design, poorly executed.” But the acoustics are surprisingly good, and I have folk CDs Krista hasn’t heard. We’ll go to the Chautauqua tent one night and either tour Madeline Island or take a historical launch tour of the Apostles. I’ll bet Krista is bringing her guitar.

enjoy. mackinaw is a nice spot for a day. the fornt porch of the grand hotel is marvelous for tea and scones. hope the sun shines for you. i love fudge but need it made with no marshmellows and that gets a little tricky.

Steve, I have been on “the intricate network of obscure blacktop Wisconsin county roads that don’t make many maps” – all these County roads F and G and AA and you’re damn lucky if you see all the signs… Part of the excitement of the trips to visit our Herbster friends.

The teenager and I do a traditional Hayward long weekend every summer. This is dictated by the teenager; once she even wrote out a schedule for us to make sure we could get everything in. Camping near Hayward, Lumberjack show, Wilderness Walk (animal park), two rounds of miniature golf (there are two mini golf courses in Hayward), one afternoon stroll up and down mainstreet with the requisite fudge and Hayward sweatshirt purchases and one trip out 27 and N to see our property and say hi to the tree where my dad’s ashes are scattered. Oh, and a stop at Fawn-Doe-Rosa in St. Croix Falls on the way home. These are the minimum requirements for this trip!

If you are looking for variety this year, VS, I have two suggestions. The Turk’s Inn on Hwy 63 is beautiful and you get middle-eastern food (try finding that in the north woods). They used to have peacocks and all kinds of exotic pheasants in little pens. Or try the food at Ross’ Teal Lake Lodge. That’s a superbly run resort where the owners understand food.

Yes, we’ve been to Turks. In fact, my grandmother was a good friend of the Turk, way back when. Teenager thinks it’s “too fancy” for our weekend. I’ll see if I can get her to try Teal Lake w/ me this year!

You wanna take State 35 north and east of Danbury (gorgeous crossing of Namekagon); go east on County M at Moose Junction (holy Toledo, Maude, d’ya suppose two moose had a junction here once?); go north on 53 through Solon Springs; grab County B east to the Brule River, and you’re damn near there, baby! I suppose some of that could be washed out, too, but if M is closed there is always cute, wiggly little T.

how nice that she has things that are so special to her. fawn doe rosa sounds a little suspect but i remember those attractions when i was a little one holding a specail curiosity primarily because my dad would never stop at those spots. just for tourists. but dad we are tourists… never stopped.

If we have a 3 day weekend, we are most likely to stay at home or go to Fargo to see our son and daughter-in-law. Rapid City would be a possibility, but as beautiful as the Black Hills are, I find I really don’t like Rapid or most of the bigger towns in that area. They just seem as though they shouldn’t be there-its hard to explain why. Too much tourism at the expense of the surrounding environment, perhaps.

Friend of mine has been working the show at Medora for the last couple years… her show notes one night reported “Shane (Horse) is feeling better and is back in the show.
Pyro wasn’t set off because of rattlesnake near control box.”

I’m going to shut up soon here. I just checked the web site for Cornucopia, and it has a delightful description of local conditions that was obviously written by a local guy for other locals. He describes a gravel road right near my cabin this way: “Klemik Road is much worse than it was.” (That sounds pretty bad to me!) And how about the town harbor? He wrote that it would be closed because “You could not believe the stuff coming down the Skiskiwit River!” :)

For several years, when I can, I take youngest daughter and go to Duluth. We would hike up various rivers, eat dark chocolate ice cream from the Portland Malt Shop by the lake (a standard last activity before heading home), look for agates by the lake, and generally be lazy. One advantage of this was free lodging at my sister & brother-in-law’s small house, which had a lovely deck overlooking the gently flowing St. Louis River, a mile or two downriver from Jay Cooke State Park. When it’s sunny and 70 in Fond du Lac (their neighborhood), it’s hard to do anything except laze on the deck, staring at the river.

It was too rainy to sit on the deck much the last time I was there – just this past Friday through Monday. Something tells me it wouldn’t be very pleasant to sit on the deck now – or in the near future. Unless I’m in a canoe. Here’s an arial shot of my sister’s house (from the Duluth News Tribune website):

Everyone is fine – sister, her husband, cat, dog – except some of the chickens didn’t make it. A few inches of water in the house (no basement, no second floor). I don’t really know more than that at this point.

Their house was not on a hill, but it definitely wasn’t on the same level as the river (like it is now). They were on a little point. It was a lovely, lovely spot – especially on a day like today, when you could sit and watch the sunlight sparkle on the water (the water doesn’t look very “sparkly” in the picture, does it). There were sometimes great blue herons, geese, swans, bald eagles, and she had won some recognition for her garden area…can’t remember what exactly, but she kept it pretty natural by the river, and then had lots of flowers and bird feeders, all sorts of birds including hummingbirds. That was in addition to her huge vegetable garden in the back (the white things you see in the upper left of the photo were shed & greenhouse with the garden in front of it. Sorry for going on and on…

Man! How awful and the water is so red (read: muddy?)
It almost looks as if her house might be on a tiny hill. I hope it is so that the damage could be minimized a little bit. I hope she and her family are OK and that it’s somehow not as bad as it looks.

We still sometimes go with sister-in-law up to Sweet Lake (NW Wisc. near Barnes and also not far from Hayward) – a truly sweet, pristine (no large motors allowed) little lake that is the end of the Upper Eau Claire Chain of Lakes. They have generous friends with a cabin, and we used to have annual Hassing Family gatherings there when the kids were growing up – canoeing at dawn, sleeping out on the raft, water volleyball, swinging out over the lake from a tree, watch/hear the loons, hike in the woods and find blueberries… The boy cousins would have their own tent and felt very grown up. Each family was responsible for supplying/preparing one meal. I remember it was a lot of work getting ready, but SO much fun to be there. (This is the 90s when all but one of two of the siblings were still speaking.) Great memories.

We don’t own a cabin, but are lucky enough to know any number of people who do and who have been kind enough, over the years, to invite us to use their cabins when they’re not using them themselves. There is one on Ely Lake near Eveleth, one on Lake Vermillion, and one tiny, but exquisitely beautiful cabin deep in the woods near Grand Rapids. Common to all three of those cabins is that the owners are Finnish or of Finnish heritage and thus all have wood-fired saunas. The first two cabins are lake cabins with all that that entails, swimming, paddling around in our kayaks, and even the occasional cruise on a pontoon boat. The Lake Vermillion cabin is a great place for foraging for edible plants, including blueberries. The cabin in the woods is located on a small knoll overlooking a babbling creek, it’s a marvelous place to commune with nature or read a book.

Will Steger happens to be a friend of husband’s, so we have spent many a long weekend at his compound near Ely. The homestead consists of numerous tiny cabins scattered throughout the woods, a larger guest house, a main lodge where the kitchen is and all meals are eaten. In addition, there is a wood shop, misc. storage buildings, a wood fired sauna, and a large three or four story building that, if it is ever finished, will be an environmental conference center. We call it the castle, it’s pretty fanciful and unique, conceived by Will on one of this expeditions to the South Pole. The excursions to the homestead are particularly enjoyable for me because I get to cook for a couple of guys who are not spoiled with fancy meals. Wills place is not really a place to kick back and relax, there’s always so much work to be done, but it’s always fun hanging out with the assortment of characters from all over the world that inevitably are there. It’s a great place to visit, summer or winter.

For some obscure reason we just happen to know several arctic and antarctic explorers. Never sought them out, just happened. We know Will’s place especially well though, because husband, back in the days when he had his own furniture making business, actually worked one whole summer at the homestead making furniture. When you hang out in a place like that, some very interesting characters show up from time to time.

Twin Cities – where daughters and baboons live, or little town in IA where my mom lives, or the lake where you’re all invited next month. (Are you getting sick of these reminders yet?) It takes an extra long weekend to visit my son in NY. Once or twice a year I get there.

Heard from our goat mom yesterday that everyone survived the storm. The goats were still in their life vests though.

Well, that doesn’t seem to work, but just maybe when I hit “Post Comment” it’ll convert into a usable URL?? I saw this on Mauer’s show last night and emailed it (yes, successfully) to many friends (but only liberal ones for obvious reasons). I can’t believe how closely Reggie Brown resembles Obama both in appearance and voice.

I really like to stay home for long weekends and it is a good thing because my pocketbook and car agree. My car doesn’t like to go far or fast and my needs are modest. My house and garden provide more than enough projects and puttering to satisfy me.

Minneapolis/St. Paul with lakes, parks, bus system and free art and social activities provide day trips or little getaways when I choose. Usually there is a sibling reunion trip once a year and maybe a trip to the UP where my son lives, almost off the grid, on 80 acres of wild land off a dirt road. Although, the last couple of trips I have chosen to sleep at the 4-room motel at the intersection close to his turn-off; they don’t lock the doors, just leave the key on the dresser and a sign in sheet on the door of the room they use as an office.

I have had many travels and adventures but I am not drawn to it now. My retired life seems like vacation and travel kinda seems like work.

My perfect long week end would stretch into at least one week or maybe two and I know exactly where I’d want to be: on another Carnival cruise, only this time with my daughter and her daughter. The other option is Kauai, where a male friend lives and has invited me to stay for free while he shows me all the island’s hidden places. This invitation has stood for four years as I’m a bit intimidated at the thought of 8 hours in the air. With my longevity questionable, I’m thinking, “What’s a reverse mortgage for if not to adventure while I can?” Actually, my primary fear of spending a couple of weeks in Kauai is that I would not want to leave!

Since I don’t work Mondays, every weekend is a long weekend. :-)
The best part is that Sundays are much more enjoyable without the Sword of Demain hanging over.(petit joke francais).
I, too, have friends with cabins, one near Brainerd and one near Detroit Lakes. Each has a now annual weekend with a few friends (movie group and church choir group).
Even though my younger son with Aspergers and a mental health diagnosis does very well on his own, any invitation to be out of town for more than a day or two instantly brings a twinge of “whataboutTim”. Sometimes I think of asking if he can come along but haven’t done so as I try to make myself believe that I deserve the time to myself.
I’d like to go abroad again and do think the next trip will include him as he has never been. He’s a pretty good travel companion as he’s pretty willing to do whatever I suggest except that he moves through museums at a breakneck pace.

can you let him go at the breakneck pace and just catch him at the other end? is there an area that would be of interest to him where you could show him how it works on an area that a person is interesed in? is he good with a book by himself or are there things he can do while you do the museums?

I have let him rush through museums but knowing that he’s waiting (no matter how contentedly) compromises my enjoyment. Since his personality changed somewhat (for better and worse) after his psychotic breaks 4 years ago, he would probably choose to stay by me but occasionally tug at my sleeve like a child bored with a shopping trip. Again, I can politely ask him to stop but I still think about him and not the exhibit. I’m sure that with some thought, I could craft a tour that found a balance between his interests and mine.

Anywhere I can be with friends laughing so hard you fall of a chair, weep, feel you might lose bladder function, can’t speak because your gasping for air, and about the time you’re catching your breath someone says something that sets you off again….yeah. That. Doesn’t matter where.

Oh how I miss my old hardy laughter!! It was so contagious that people would be laughing at my laugh. Surgery cutting through my diaphragm robbed me of this function almost entirely, thereby closing off a major form of human intimacy. At least I don’t have the stress incontinence issue any more?

i thought and intended to have it take you to an individual email item in my list,
i bet if i think for a bit i can have some fune with email people links to their own email accts. sounds kind of fun.
if i told you i had found this out there and i was sure you would want to do something about this being available for everyone to see ill bet that would cause some gnashing of teeth for a moment or two.

it is a holiday celebrating dragon boat day. saying the world is happy with dragon boat day celebration. i gather yesterday is a dragon bioat day celebration of some kind there although this is the first card i ever remember getting. i will forward to linda and pj and anyone else who requests it via email.

i always loved buffy but her vibrato is a bit much for me. put a stick in her mouth and it is perfect. her tone i wonderful with the stick in her mouth. maybe thats an answer i can turn to for other things too.